July 23, 2025
Last Week’s Summer Reads
Once again, summer reads stacked up like a dream, this time on last week’s trip to the Lanaudiere region of Quebec, where we fell in love with the cleanest lake, shared a lawn with a fat groundhog, went swimming every day, and had fires almost every evening in the company of wonderful friends, the very best time. And the books were just as book, eclectic, fun, sparkling and magical.
I began with Jess Walter’s SO FAR GONE, which I picked up at Spark Books in Perth en-route (actually on the recommendation of David Worsley from Words Worth Books in Waterloo). I read and adored Walter’s BEAUTIFUL RUINS on a summer holiday years ago, and this very different kind of story proved just as rich and satisfying. It’s about a man who has retreated to a secluded property in Washington State after his long career in journalism fizzled out with the industry and after he punched his conspiracy nut son-in-law in the face during Thanksgiving in 2016. And then all these years, there are two children on his doorstep whom he fails to recognize as his grandchildren, and SO FAR GONE is the story of his wobbly redemption as he is forced to return to to the world and save his grandkids from the dangerous militia their dad has become embroiled with. Funny, thoughtful, twisty, and absorbing, this one is definitely a highlight of the summer.
Next up I read KAKIGORI SUMMER, by Emily Itami (who is Japanese, but writes in English, and whose text engages with Japanese kanji in the most interesting way), which I bought at Words Worth in Waterloo the week before, and which is going to be a highlight of the year. I’d previously read Itami’s novel FAULT LINES, and liked it very much, but this one is even better, the story of three Japanese sisters (their mother is dead, their father is barely known to them, living with a new family in his native England) whose lives are far apart but who come together again when the youngest—a pop star—becomes embroiled in a national scandal. Together, along with the middle sister’s young son, they all return to their childhood home, and the company of their prickly great grandmother, and are forced to make sense of their history, the possibilities for their future, all the promises of a beautiful, imperfect world, and the fragility of life itself.
I read Mick Herron’s DEAD LIONS after that, the second book in the SLOW HORSES series. I’ve not seen the TV show, but am enjoying the books a lot, and my husband who is two books ahead of me claims that the series continues to be great. It’s a spy thriller that subverts expectations at every turn, such a fresh take on a familiar genre, so that it continues to be cozy and surprising at once, and also so prescient—this one’s about the Russian threat lying dormant after the fall of the USSR and just waiting to spring up again.
And then I read THREE SUMMERS, by Margarita Liberaki, a recommendation with Teri Vlassopoulos via Julia Zarankin, an English translation of a Greek classic published in 1946, another book about three sisters coming of age in a bucolic idyll that feels worlds away from where Greece actually was at the time of publication. Dreamlike, steeped in heat and atmosphere, the story is strange and surprising, secrets and hidden strengths and weaknesses revealed, the story itself ever changing amidst a world where so much stays the same.
Next up was LANDLINES, by Rainbow Rowell, which came out in 2014 and I recall readers feeling let down by, and so I didn’t have any expectations. I fell in love with Rowell’s work when I finally read ATTACHMENTS, and then ELEANOR & PARK, and her most recent books, SLOW DANCE (which I loved SO MUCH). Perhaps fans of her super-hit FAN GIRL weren’t as interesting in LANDLINES, a time-bending story about a long marriage, and motherhood, the middle-agedness of it all, but that’s what SLOW DANCE is all about, and it’s right up my street. I loved it, and now keep listening to “Leather and Lace” and not even ironically.
And then finally, HERE ONE MOMENT, by Liane Moriarty, whose books I LOVE, but I didn’t rush after this one when it came out because the premise was so odd (it’s about a plane full of people to whom a mysterious passenger delivers each of their precise dates and causes of death) and PREMISEY. I didn’t love Moriarty’s novel NINE PERFECT STRANGERS, and while I appreciate her urge to spread her creative wings and not simply rewrite BIG LITTLE LIES over and over, I felt her latest might be more of the same. But it really surprised me, and I enjoyed it so much, especially Moriarty’s beautiful talent for investing difficult characters with the most human and sympathetic edges. The story had me GRIPPED, but I had to put it down unfinished on our last night away, and throughout the six hour drive home, I was so looking forward to finally getting to the end, the most delicious anticipation.
